Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is the formal statement of independence from Britain made by the Continental Congress through which the thirteen American colonies became the United States of America. It was passed and signed well over a year after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The patriot leadership had initially insisted that they were fighting for the redress of grievances and that they sought reconciliation with Britain. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington claimed that they did not consider independence until well into 1775. In addition, several colonies specifically instructed their delegates not to consent to independence in the closing months of 1775 and the beginning of 1776. However, independence soon became a practical necessity, both in order to give the state governments official sanction to exercise authority and in order to permit the negotiation of treaties with foreign countries. The movement gained added momentum from popular outrage at British military tactics, including their use of slaves and mercenaries, and from the realization that there was no chance of mediation by King George III. Thomas Paine articulated the most compelling case for independence in his widely read pamphlet, Common Sense, published in January 1776.

Richard Henry Lee proposed a series of resolutions for independence in the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, stating that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." After four days of debate, Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration consisting of members from the northern, middle, and southern colonies. The committee included John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut. They delegated the task of making the first draft to Jefferson and submitted to Congress on June 28: "A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled." The motion for independence passed on July 2, with the single abstention of New York. There followed a debate and amendments to Jefferson's draft, and the final draft, titled "The Unanimous Declaration of the 13 United States of America," was approved on July 4.

According to a later account by John Adams, the committee chose Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration because he had a reputation for his literary skills and because he was from Virginia, which was the largest state in the union, with about a quarter of the total population. Jefferson's primary concern was to justify the reasons for declaring independence from Britain. The great body of the text is therefore a long litany of grievances, for which Jefferson personally blamed George III. This was because he wanted to establish that a state of tyranny existed to legitimate the rebellion: "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of injuries & usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world."

The opening paragraphs of the Declaration are its most well-known section. It asserts the broader principles that Jefferson, as he asserted in a letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, "intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit" (Ford, vol. 10, p. 343). The second paragraph most famously includes the assertion "that all men are created equal," it proclaims the doctrine of natural and inalienable rights that governments must protect, including "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and it states that government is based on the "consent of the governed." Although debate continues among historians about the source of the ideas contained in the Declaration, it is widely held that Jefferson was particularly indebted to the writings of John Locke. Indeed, there is such strong similarity with passages in Locke's Second Treatise on Government that Richard Henry Lee charged that Jefferson plagiarized from Locke. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers Frances Hutcheson and Lord Kames also influenced Jefferson, together with the thought of English republicans and "Country" Whigs, the seventeenth and eighteenth century opposition writers and politicians like Lord Bolingbroke. Jefferson later recalled that he turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing the Declaration, since he did not consider it his role to invent new ideas altogether or to offer sentiments that had never been expressed before.

In the minds of modern readers, the lofty ideals of the document might seem at odds with the reality of social conditions at the time they were written. The claim "that all men are created equal" particularly seems at variance with the presence of slaves, who accounted for a fifth of the total population in 1776. Indeed, such sentiments appear hypocritical from the pen of one who was himself a tobacco planter and slave owner. While Jefferson denounced slavery throughout his life, historians disagree about his sincerity. He had included in the original draft of the Declaration a passage condemning George III for the slave trade, but this section was deleted at the behest of southern representatives in the Continental Congress. And he did exclude slavery in his draft of an ordinance for the Northwest Territories. As president of the United States, Jefferson played a major role in the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. Towards the end of his life, he wrote nothing was more certainly written in the book of fate than that slaves would eventually be free. However, he did not emancipate his own slaves, unlike George Washington. Furthermore, he was unable to conceive of a biracial society, believing that blacks and whites could not live under the same government. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), in which he condemned the slave trade, he wrote of his "suspicion" and "opinion" that blacks were mentally and physically inferior to whites. He proposed a gradual plan of emancipation but advocated that free blacks be resettled elsewhere.

Whatever Jefferson's intentions, his use of abstract universal principles in the Declaration of Independence has facilitated the demands of those seeking equality. Martin Luther King, Jr. described it as a promissory note to black people in his "I Have a Dream" speech. Nevertheless, the laudable ideals that it expresses did not prevent manifest inequalities, especially between the races. Slavery was abolished throughout much of the Caribbean and South America before it was officially outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution in the United States.

See also Banneker, Benjamin; Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Slavery and the Constitution; Thirteenth Amendment

Bibliography

Becker, Carl L. The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1922. Reprint, New York: Knopf, 1942.

Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1892–99.

Jayne, Allen. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Onuf, Peter S. Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Wills, Gary. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

andrew jackson o'shaughnessy (2005)